Comment by simonw
3 years ago
I believe database migrations should be boring and common.
At many places I've worked they've been exciting and rare - which massively hurts engineering velocity, to the point that sometimes teams will build things in a really convoluted way rather than go through the bureaucracy of having a schema change accepted!
At my work right now (where we're using Laravel, which has migrations as a cultural standard) we have many migrations. But 95% if not more of them are adding stuff, very few are removing or refactoring stuff. The database evolved under harsh deadlines and growth so there's a lot of technical debt in there.
It's definitely not terrible, but just wished to see people talking about using migrations to refactor databases a bit more.